Your outcome goal should directly align your SEO efforts with company goals, so ask yourself:
What SEO outcome contributes towards the company’s broader goals?
Looking at mission statements, frequently asked questions in meetings, etc., can help answer this. If you get stuck, ask your boss or client.
Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of saying “get more traffic.” While getting more traffic may help the company achieve its goals, it’s far too broad. Your outcome goal needs to be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.
So, a better goal than “get more traffic” would be to “rank in the top 3 for [high-value keyword] in 6 months.”
This goal is specific and relevant because ranking for [high value keyword] will increase revenue. It’s measurable because you can track keyword rankings with any good rank tracking tool, such as Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. It’s achievable because you already assessed keyword difficulty. And it’s time-based because you specified the timeframe.
Here is a visualization of our SEO goal pyramid so far:
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
2. Set performance goal(s)
Performance goals are the goalposts you set for yourself, so start by answering the question:
What short-term wins will most likely get us to our outcome goal?
You can have one or multiple performance goals. What they are will depend on your outcome goal and bandwidth. Just be careful not to fall into that same trap of setting arbitrary goals like “increase backlinks.” This may help you achieve your outcome, but it isn’t SMART. There’s no way of knowing when or if you’ve achieved the goal.
Continuing with our example outcome goal of “rank in the top 3 for [high-value keyword] in 6 months,” a SMART performance goal might be to “get 40 high-quality backlinks to the page within six months.”
It’s specific because we’re aiming for a certain number of backlinks.
It’s measurable using the referring domains graph in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer: